Our Short History

by Lauren Grodstein

  “Oh hi, Karen. You looking for Ace? He went golfing. He should be back in an hour or two. He didn’t pick up his phone?”

  I could have just hung up, but instead I pressed my luck. “You know how he is when he’s golfing. How was France?”

  “Oh, God, it was amazing. Incredible. Normandy—have you been there, Karen?”

  I hadn’t.

  “Well, you wouldn’t even believe the place we stayed, like this eight-hundred-year-old castle. There was a chapel in the back where Joan of Arc supposedly prayed! Can you even believe that?”

  I told Jill I couldn’t believe it, but it sounded great, and just as I was about to hang up, she said, “Ace really liked it too! I mean, usually he’s so eager to be back home in the Bronx, but this time he really took to it. I had to get home to help my mother with her house, but Ace stuck around for a few days. He wanted to get a closer look at the Normandy landing sites.”

  “He did?” My heart sank.

  “He did! You know how he’s just a history buff at heart. And it’s pretty shocking up there, all those graves lined up by the sea, white crosses. American soldiers. You can’t help but be moved.”

  “I’m sure,” I said. “How long was he there for?”

  “Just an extra two days. He took some great photos, though. You should ask him to show you.”

  I really should, I thought.

  I hung up the phone wondering about damage control, even though I wasn’t sure what the damage really was. There were photos? Of what? Would Ace really have been dumb enough to fly in an intern for forty-eight hours of French nookie? And if so, could I get him to confess?

  In campaign crisis management, I always believed that anything was fixable if you got out in front of it and that the electorate didn’t truly care about anything besides their sense that someone was, deep down, a decent person. Would they have a beer with this guy? Would they be happy to hang out with him at a ball game? Ace was a beer and ball game guy, a fixer and a schmoozer, and one of them—a little bit better dressed but basically one of them. He rooted for the Yankees; he played golf at Van Cortlandt up in the Bronx. And even if he had been unfaithful—hell, who among us couldn’t understand the need to have sex with cute twenty-year-olds?

  But your candidate needed to tell you the truth. You needed to have strong and open lines of communication at all times. You needed to have a bond of truth like steel. So it really didn’t help when you couldn’t even get your guy on the phone. When I made the questionable choice to leak those abortion records, at least I knew my guy was behind me, 100 percent.

  “Amani, it’s Karen, pick up,” I said to an answering machine. Ace oversaw a constituency the size of half the population of Wyoming. He was a member of the council of the most important and dynamic city in the world. Why did he have to bang an intern? Again? And get caught? Didn’t he love his wife?

  I stood up, but I moved too quickly; my sutures pulled. I was also starting to get that woozy feeling I got sometimes on codeine, and for a moment it crossed my mind that I should not be doing this right now. I leaned against the wall for support. It was a Sunday afternoon in a New York City summer. Nobody else was working—why should I have been the only one?

  Still, I brought the laptop to bed and did a deep dive into the recent media, all through my incipient headache. I still couldn’t dig up any photos. There were no whispers on the inside–New York City–politics blogs. Was it possible that Jorge was trying to psych me out? Twenty-five-year-old Jorge with his Montalbán suaveness and the deft chuckle?

  Back on Facebook, I sussed out Jorge. My, but he was handsome, dark hair in a thick brush cut, nicely tailored suit at Bev’s recent fund-raiser. Tan skin, an easy smile. Reflexively, I wondered if he was single. He seemed to be. Was he gay? His interests included politics (duh), the Yankees (duh again), cooking, and meringue. Cooking and meringue! Jorge was either gay or a catch. I wondered if there was anything about Jorge worth sharing with the world? Fight fire with fire? But no—the most cursory internet examination came back clean as bleach.

  Could Ace have really been so stupid? My heart was no longer pounding, and I could think clearly about the possibility. Would he have? Could he have? I feared I knew the answer.

  I checked to see what Bev had been up to, but her Facebook page showed only one new photo, from a distance. She looked like she’d lost weight. She’d also included a link to her campaign website, which was finally up and running but contained no new information except for a list of local appearances, which I made a note of. As soon as I was up to it, I’d go do a little recon in the Bronx. It would be nice to see Bev in person, go eyeball-to-eyeball. If I needed to protect Ace from himself, I would need to get to know his opponent. I’d do it when I had a few more resources. When I’d recovered a little more of my old gusto.

  Since I was on Facebook anyway, I clicked over to your father’s site, both hopeful and terrified I’d find a picture of you. I didn’t want him to be posting pictures of you. I didn’t want the world to see him with you and expect to see more of him with you. But there were no pictures, no new bits of gossip. There was only one line, liked by five people, commented on by nobody: “Having the time of my life.”

  I knew enough then and slept away the rest of the afternoon.

  THAT NIGHT, I gave Allie clearance to take herself to a movie—she’d been running around with two six-year-olds all day—and took on the bath and bedtime duties by myself. We hadn’t done nighttime alone in the apartment in a long time and the rhythms of it felt creaky to me, especially because I didn’t want to move too fast. I’d tried to put Ace out of my mind, but I still felt a little worried. Regardless, at 8 p.m. I ran your bath; at 8:15 I began to nag you about getting in. At 8:23 you acquiesced and stripped down to your underwear with an admonishment that I should not look at your butt. Then you got into the bath and I kept my eyes averted until your private bits were submerged under the bubbles, at which point I took my place on the floor so we could chat. This was how we’d done bath time for the past year or so, ever since you became aware of your body and my body and how they were different, and my scars became things I wanted to hide.

  “What did you do all day?” you asked, which was sweet. “Did you feel healthy?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I dealt with Ace, mostly.”

  “Our old friend Ace,” you said, mimicking me. I handed you a soapy cloth so you could wash yourself.

  “Hey, you never told me how it went at your dad’s house.”

  You paused for a little bit. I guess I’d already taught you to be cagey. “It was fun,” you said, splashing a little at the sides of the tub. “We ate spaghetti.”

  “What was his apartment like?”

  You shrugged. “It was pretty nice. It was bigger than our apartment.”

  “That’s because it’s in New Jersey.”

  “I guess.”

  “I heard you watched Spider-Man,” I said. “Which one?”

  “Spider-Man 3,” you said, a bit mournfully. You knew what was coming.

  “Jacob, what’s that rated?”

  “PG-13,” you said. “But it wasn’t scary! It wasn’t! And my dad covered my eyes!”

  “He covered your eyes?”

  “When it got scary!”

  “I thought you said it wasn’t scary.”

  “But just in case.”

  Goddammit. “Jacob, you know you’re not allowed to watch those movies,” I said. “You know you’re not thirteen. If you get nightmares, you only have yourself to blame.” Which couldn’t have been less true.

  You splashed the water against the side of the tub, not looking at me. “I know,” you said, but already you were playing me against Dave. My dad covered my eyes.

  “Duck your head,” I said, and after I’ve washed the soap out of your hair, I asked you if his wife was there, which was a question I’d wanted to ask earlier but didn’t, afraid of how I’d seem.

  You shook your head. “My dad says she travels a l
ot. To tell you the truth, I think he’s kind of lonely.”

  “He might be,” I agreed.

  “Do you think that’s why he wants to hang out with me? Cause he’s alone all the time?”

  “No,” I said. “I think he wants to hang out with you because you’re a cool kid and he likes you a lot. You’re fun to be with.”

  “And I’m his son,” you said.

  “And you’re his son.”

  You took some of the Playmobil figures from the edge of the bath and started making them dive in and out of the bubbles. Occasionally they stopped to shoot each other. After a few minutes you seemed to forget I was there and started providing your figures with voices, strange accents, high whiny voices for the characters who were dressed as farmers and athletes and deep growly voices for the pirates. I thought about all the toys we had left at Allison’s and wondered, if Ace lost the election, if he really had shagged another bimbo, whether we should move to Seattle sooner than we’d planned on. It had to be harder to wage a custody battle with someone in Seattle. I mean, worst case, we could always run to Vancouver.

  “Did I hurt your feelings?” you said, and for a minute I thought you were talking to the dolls before I realized you were talking to me. “Did you want me to stay in the hospital with you?”

  “No, honey, of course not.” My abdomen was starting to ache. I thought about what I’d eaten today: half a bagel, hardly enough.

  “But you were mad when I left.”

  “I was just worried whether you’d be okay with Dave.”

  “You looked mad.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  You floated your plastic figures above the water and then watched them drop below the surface. “Are you closer to dying now?”

  I felt my heart pause, then double beat. “No,” I said. “In fact, when they looked inside me they saw that the tumor hasn’t spread much. The chemo’s still working.”

  You were quiet then, swirling your toys around in the water. I wondered if I really should have been talking to you all along in these frank words: chemo, tumor. Dr. Susan, as you might remember, was all for honesty and direct language, but it still seemed strange to me that a six-year-old should know what chemotherapy was.

  “Do you think they’re wrong?” you asked, looking up at me. “Maybe you’re not going to die after all?”

  Despite my aching body, I reached out into the tub and touched your sweet soft face. “I don’t know, Jakey,” I said. “I don’t know.” This is what I said to you when I didn’t want to tell you the truth.

  “I think they’re wrong,” you said. “Or at least they might not be right.”

  I agreed with you, they might not be right, and then I staggered up and helped you out of the bath and wrapped you in the hooded towel you’d gotten for a gift when you were born; it used to drag on the floor after you, and now it hit your knees. You were growing every day, my son, and in different ways, so was I.

  Before bed we decided to read the first chapter of Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone, which I’d gotten you for Chanukah and you’d had no time for. But you mentioned that Dave was a big Harry Potter fan and was surprised you don’t know much about it, so we decided to get started right away, to make up for this deficit and any others. You cuddled into the corner of your bed. The air-conditioning was high; the lights were low. Your hair was wet. You were mine, baby, you were mine. Nobody could ever take you from me. I opened the first page and started to read.

  BY THE TIME Allie got home, it was ten and I was mostly asleep. She hadn’t gone to the movies after all; she’d gone shopping and then out to dinner, which was funny because in Seattle Allie would never go to a restaurant by herself: What if someone saw her alone and jumped to conclusions? But here, in New York, we were all free to be whomever we wanted.

  “Look what I bought you!” she said, handing me a bag. Inside was a leather jacket.

  Jesus, Allie. “You’ve got to be kidding. Why would you get me this?” I could see the price tag, four hundred dollars. Allie was both generous beyond measure and an enormous show-off.

  “It was fifty percent off, out of season. I already have two. I couldn’t get it for Camilla, she’s so spoiled. And it was such a bargain, I couldn’t let it go.”

  I groaned, let her help me sit up. “Allie, you’ve got to stop buying me stuff. I can’t take it with me, you know.”

  “Shut up,” she said. She helped me out of bed and I turned on the light, stood in front of the full-length mirror. I didn’t look at myself until I’d put the jacket on (I couldn’t look at myself at night, I looked so awful). But with the jacket on, I looked much better: it was gorgeous, soft and black, with a wool insert inside to keep me warm. I was glad to be warm; I had the air-conditioning turned up too high. I kept it on and got back in bed. She got in next to me.

  For a while, we said nothing, letting the air conditioner hum at us. “I called Daddy today.”

  “That was nice of you,” I said. “Any news?”

  “He said hello. At least it sounded like hello.”

  “What did Olga say?”

  “She said everything’s basically the same.”

  I wished I could tell him about you, everything we’d been doing. I had no idea how much he could understand, so why couldn’t I just assume he could understand all of it? That like Cammy said, he just had it all locked away? Still, the idea of spilling out my guts to a man who couldn’t tell us where he was, what his name was, or even that his wife of forty years was dead (Did he know this? At her funeral he stared straight ahead even when we pointed to her coffin)—it seemed unnecessarily cruel. If I told him I was dying and he didn’t say a word—that would be cruel for both of us.

  Jacob, did I ever tell you my mother cooked dinner for my grandparents every night? She’d get home from the law firm, trade her heels for sneakers, and start pulling things out of the fridge or the pantry. Twenty minutes later she’d have two plates made up on a tray, and she’d send either me or Allie upstairs to feed my grandparents. They’d open the door, say, “Thank you, dear,” and take the tray. Half an hour later one of us would go back to pick it up. And all that time, all those years, barely a word passed between us.

  “Do you remember how Mom made dinner for Grandma and Grandpa?” I asked Allie, because suddenly it felt like a forged memory, like something that was too strange to have really happened.

  But Allie remembered. “She respected them. What they’d been through. She wanted to do something for them.”

  “I should have been more grateful,” I said.

  “We were so young, though.”

  “I was ten,” I said. “That’s old enough.” Outside our window, people were laughing loudly.

  After several minutes, Allie said, “Bruce says he and Ross are at it again. Evidently Ross stayed out till two in the morning Saturday. Didn’t text, didn’t pick up his phone. Bruce went crazy on him, took away his car. And of course they’re not talking to each other.”

  “Shit,” I said.

  “It’s never been like this, not even when he was thirteen, fourteen, the age they’re supposed to be brats.”

  “Is he still talking about India?”

  “He thinks if he pouts enough it’ll happen,” Allie said. “Eighteen years old, the kid is walking around like he gets to make his own decisions, like he’s in charge of his own life.”

  “He sort of is,” I said.

  “He’s in charge of some things,” Allie said. “He can decide what he wants to study, what he wants to do with his time. But he can’t decide he’s going to move to the third world for some person we’ve never met.”

  “Is India the third world?”

  “For Ross it would be. For Ross some parts of Seattle are the third world.”

  “He’d probably come home again,” I said, mildly.

  Allie dragged a pillow over her head. Muffled by the pillow, she said, “I’m just not ready to let him go.”

  Sure she wasn’t. I said,
“I know how you feel.”

  In the dark, from her hiding space under the pillow, Allie squeezed my hand, and the old platinum ring on my thumb, and we fell asleep pondering the condition of being mothers, which was, of course, the condition of helping the people you love most in the world leave you.

  11

  Sometimes I wonder if you think politics is irrelevant, or if I spend entirely too much time wrapped up in poll numbers or my candidate’s personal life. I hope you don’t—I mean, I hope you know it’s meaningful. I hope you’re registered to vote. You are, aren’t you? And you vote even in the years that end in an odd number?

  My own political awakening stemmed in part from my father’s history lessons and in part, I fear, from being the poorest kid in Rockville Centre. I mean, I wasn’t really the poorest—I was never on free lunch, never went without a winter coat—but I was the only one I knew who didn’t go to camp, didn’t wear Guess jeans or Reebok sneakers. This privation led me, in my adolescence, to a strong identification with the poor and meek and unpopular. Every year I grimly ran for student government on a platform of banishing the homecoming court; every year I lost badly. By my senior year of high school, I understood that someone like me (mouthy, occasionally impolite, unafraid of confrontation) would make a better campaign manager than candidate. And that seemed perfectly all right; candidates live or die by the voter, but campaign managers always live to fight another day.

  As I hope you remember, I went on to college at SUNY Binghamton, graduating with a degree in poli-sci in 1992. It was a presidential campaign year, and there was considerable excitement around a candidate named Bill Clinton. He was a youngish dude from Arkansas with a proclivity for fast food and loose women, a good talker and very smart. On the whole, people liked him. Earlier in the primaries, I’d been a fan of a guy named Paul Tsongas but—and at the time this seemed no more than a distant sadness—he was a metastatic cancer patient who really never stood a chance. So once Tsongas lost in the primaries, I became a Clinton girl, defending him against charges of hillbillyism and sexual predation and admiring him for his stand on reproductive rights and the way he played the saxophone. (Is Bill Clinton still alive when you’re reading this? I hope so. He’s a complicated figure but on the whole, I believe, a force for good, and these days I think of him as a much-improved version of Ace.)